All in all, she was nobody’s Princess Charming in those days” (Spada, 1987: 31). And, like her father, an athlete and entrepreneur, she was nearsighted, which made it necessary for her to wear glasses. Her enjoyment of food gave her a little extra weight. She always has had trouble with her nose, and in her childhood winters she had been the victim of one long sustained cold in the head. Her mother, a former model and physical education teacher, described her as an adolescent: “In her teen years, she was nothing but a giggly somebody with a high nasal voice. Kelly was a sickly child who was apparently ignored in favour of her more athletic and garrulous siblings and spent much of her early years play-acting with a doll collection which she kept into adulthood. Invariably, however, some of these have significant commentaries from Kelly, her close friends, colleagues and family members and are necessarily included here from time to time. Her nouveau riche background in Philadelphia, born into an Irish-German family who made their money in construction, has formed the basis for much of the behavioral analysis that has dogged these books, with little concern for her performance or acting skills. Kelly’s biography has been covered by many writers, most of whom are consumed with her extravagant love life and her extraordinary decision to abandon Hollywood at the age of twenty-six when she was at the height of her Academy-Award winning but short career – with a mere eleven films in the can. David Thomson has written, “Grace Kelly was enough to make Hollywood believe in itself” (1994: 394). Molly Haskell classes Kelly as one of those “movie-movie stars in living Technicolor” (Haskell, 1973: 236). Much has been made of Alfred Hitchcock’s penchant for blondes but no one embodied his ideal in quite the same way as Grace Kelly, who starred in three of his films at the peak of his American career.